To understand its working, as I have understood the workings of chaos and of solitude.įor now, in the distance. I am eager to discover more of happiness. I have recognised that on some level that happiness is related to this. Of not having to prove anything, be anything at all, or to show anything. He talked of the freedom of not having to make a legacy. I spoke recently with a friend of mine, a writer. So often we want to fill up our lives rather than allow them to be filled. For the pocket of life in between success and failure, and especially in my freedom from those perspectives.

Many of those times were worthy of resistance. Many times in my life I have resisted where I found myself. And I think so much of that understanding it about not trying to control fate, about accepting time, about not wanting to get to another place. I feel I have gained an understanding of it. I remember reading the Tao Te Ching on the way over, and at times during my journey. My travel in China was busy, even frantic. The new EP is now written, and it is calling and next week I will start to record it. I am less trying to go forward with it as a project – but allowing myself to be available to when it is ready to go forward. In this way this journeys time seems to making its own markers. Sometimes, picking up little ideas that I have written along the last journey. And I am finding that each time I empty myself, I find that the next EP will somehow write itself. That when the voids empty truly, there appears a new rain. I have realised that my musical journey walks hand in hand with my sense of discovery, with my internal journey, with the slow accumulation of a deepening knowledge.Īnd yet, then I discover something more. I am for the first time enjoying the cultivation of magnificent voids in myself. Of lying down upon the naked earth and allowing the sun to wander across my closed eye with no need to do anything. Or if to be void, void, inspired, inspired, down, down, reflective, reflective, passive, passive. And when the rhythm asks for silence, to allow myself to be silent. The central characteristic of this time for me is a sense of acquiescence. This examination of independence, of self reliance, of continuing when on first appearance the world seems to be telling you to give up. Journeys has many themes and characteristics for me, and one of them for me is to document this period of my musical life.

I feel in a process of continual education, and I find that the solitude tends to educate me as much or more than than the journeys I am making. But I don’t feel like Camus, “forever a stranger to myself”. And when times are quiet I have learnt intimately the characteristics and nuances of solitude. When there is the call of activities I am available to it, and of course just grateful for the work.

My psyche has developed in tandem with these times. Things are unstable, and there are few certainties. And unlike others, my career has not swelled on the promise of momentum and allowed me any degree of comfort. Unlike many of the people I grew up with, I have survived in the desecrated environment of the musical landscape. I have found myself in the “in between world” of my musical life. I could relate to these curious buildings.

Choral journal irehearse